Vladimir Kolesnikov is a Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology working in the area of cryptography and security. Prior to this appointment he was a researcher at Bell Labs, which he joined in 2006 after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. His main current research interest is improving and applying secure computation and crypto techniques in practice. He has authored papers on garbled circuit, homomorphic encryption, related techniques and applications. He is also interested in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), blockchain, database security and privacy, key exchange and channel security. Dr. Kolesnikov has been involved in the design and analysis of Smart Grid networks, Storage Area Networks, wireless and biometric authentication, and other secure systems. His work has been supported by grants and contracts from DARPA, IARPA, ONR, NSF, Facebook, and Sandia Labs.

In more detail, Dr. Kolesnikov's research on practical secure computation (computing under encryption) has significantly advanced the field, and is standard in existing toolchains. Specifically, his Free XOR work allows for no-cost evaluation of XOR gates under encryption. It invigorated research in low AND-complexity function implementations. His ZKP work is a basis of the Picnic submission (with Microsoft and other researchers) for NIST post-quantum signature competition. He is a Georgia Tech PI on a Blockchain project (private computation on public blockchain) led by Sandia Labs under a DOE grant. He has taught "Blockchain and cryptocurrencies" course at Georgia tech in 2019 and 2020.

Dr. Kolesnikov served as a Program Chair of CSCML 2020 and SCN 2020 and General Chair of Crypto 2021 and ACNS 2015. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Internation Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the main professional body of cryptographic research.